Indian Rafale Out, MMRCA Trials by August

French fighter aircraft 'Rafale' has been knocked out of India's biggest-ever military tender to purchase 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) for the Indian Air Force (IAF) estimated to be worth over 10 billion dollar.Defence Ministry sources said it rejected the 'Rafale' bid from the French manufacturer D'assault after careful and cumbersome technical evaluation process that began in May last and ended in February this year. With this, the race for the mother-of-all-deals, as the MMRCA tender is described here, was reduced to five competitors -- US' F-16 Fighting Falcon from Lockheed Martin and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet from Boeing, European consortium EADS' Eurofighter Typhoon, Swedish Gripen NG from SAAB and Russian MiG-35 from United Aircraft Corporation. Though reasons for rejecting Rafale was not revealed, sources indicated that the high cost of the aircraft was one of the factors. "The reasons would be officially communicated to the company," they said. Now, the remaining five competitors would be called for the flight trials of their aircraft, for which the IAF headquarters was currently working out the modalities. "The flight trials will now begin in the next three months and the Air headquarters is working on the modalities for holding the flight trials," sources said. India had issued the Request for Proposals (RFP) for the 126 MMRCA in August 2007 to the six companies, who had submitted their bids by April 2008. Under the RFP norms, IAF would buy 18 of the chosen aircraft off-the-shelf and the remaining 108 would be manufactured through licensing within the country.The tender, which provided for technology transfer, also stipulated that the company bagging the contract for the MMRCA would have to comply with a 50 per cent offset clause. India had first introduced the globally-practiced offsets clause in its Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) in 2006 under which foreign companies bagging contracts worth over Rs 300 crore re-invest at least 30 per cent of the deal in thecountry's defence industry. With the rejection of the twin-engine Rafale, the contest would now be among three twin-engine fighters in F/A-18, MiG-35 and Eurofighter Typhoon. The single-engine contenders for the contract would be F-16s and Gripen. IAF sought to purchase the 126 MMRCA as replacements for the aging Russian fleet of MiG-21s, MiG-23s and MiG-27s, and to reduce the different platform types from the current six to just three -- Russian Su-30s, indigenous LCAs and the MMRCAs. With the IAF fleet depleting over the last decade from the sanctioned 39.5 squadrons to 33.5 squadrons at present, the induction of the MMRCA, likely to begin in 2013, would help in increasing the squadron strength to 42 squadrons by 2022.

Rafale proponents previously let known their disappointment that an exhaustive matrix table had been laid out based on a basic minimum performance in the request for proposals, and that there were no bonus points on over-compliance.Field trials once were expected immediately following the Bengaluru air show in mid-February. But since the dates were not announced, Gripen and Rafale did not bring their aircraft to the air show.Earlier, many vendors Aviation Week spoke to said they hoped the down-select would be made before the trials to enable them to be completed this year. Some indicated since the cost of holding the trials exceeded $20 million, it would help in conserving cash in this global economic recession. 'The IAF’s RFP (request for proposal), in the first analysis, in terms of performance, is not extremely demanding. We don’t want a situation where the other three aircraft are compliant with the RFP but we lose out on the price differential,' J.P.H.P. Chabriol, Dassault Aviation's senior vice president for military sales said.'The IAF has to decide whether it wants a heavy aircraft or a light aircraft,' he contended. ‘Quite obviously, there would be a price differential if a single or a twin-engine jet is chosen. If India takes the L-1 (lowest tender) route this would be unfair because we have a good product but this quality comes at a price,’ he maintained.In this context, Chabriol noted that Dassault had made an ‘unsolicited offer’ for selling 40 Rafale aircraft to India, an indication that the company would not be too disappointed if it did not win the larger order.

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